Think of the audience like Doctor Strange, splitting himself off into 14,000,605 variants in order to take in every pixel of Avengers: Infinity War. They think that they’ve covered every inch of film, every punctuation mark in the script, patched every plot hole and asked every question. Then along comes that one. That last one.
“Hey,” they say, casually. “Do you think once Thanos got ahold of the Aether, he had to pull it out of his butt or something?”
The question, posed more politely on a thread in the r/marvelstudios subreddit, is a fair one. The Aether has always been sort of a problem. According to the filmmakers, it was never supposed to be an Infinity Stone during the making of Thor: The Dark World. It was just your standard space macguffin. If they’d meant for it to be a stone, they wouldn’t have made it look like someone was vaping the Carnage symbiote. They would’ve made it look like a stone.
A couple of reshoots and ADRs later, the smokey red goo at the center of the Thor movie that everyone skips during MCU marathons had become the Reality Stone. We didn’t get an on-screen explanation for how the plot-driving cosmic oobleck wound up in a form that could be contained in the knuckle duster of an angry space grape, just shots of the aftermath: Thanos with a glove full of Reality powers, turning energy blasters into bubble wands and Benecio del Toro into a day player.
From what we’d seen of the Aether up to this point, it needed a container to keep it held together – either a vessel, like the one that the Warriors Three used to deliver it to the Collector, or a fleshy body-shaped one, like the one that used to run things on Naboo.
And so we get the last possible question available to ask about Infinity War: When Thanos got the Reality Stone, did it get sucked up inside him like it did with everyone else who touched it? And if it did, did he have to extract it like they wound up doing with Rocket and Bro Thor in Endgame?
Come to think of it, how did the Avengers get the Reality Stone to solidify in Endgame? We see it after Rocket pulls it out of past-Jane’s body, but again, no explanation for how they firmed it up.
Probably corn starch, right? It feels like the sort of thing that you could add some body to with a little bit of corn starch.